1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data storage and data storage network/fabrics in general and, more particularly, to proactive utilization of fabric events in a network virtualization environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Maintaining continual access to large amounts of data is a primary concern of many business operations and the need for data storage capacity in enterprise systems is growing exponentially. Modern network storage systems provide the ability to store data on multiple, often redundant storage devices or subsystems. Data stored across multiple devices or sub-systems are often virtualized to present a single, uniform arrangement of data to applications. Maintaining continual access to the data of a storage network requires quick, efficient detection and correction of network errors such as failures along network fabric paths to storage devices.
Detecting and handling network fabric path failures within a storage network may take a relatively long time and may cause access request failures. Traditionally, detecting network path failures has involved a host detecting that a host-initiated I/O failed, generally by timing-out before the I/O request was completed. Only after an I/O request failed or timed out, and generally after a number of retries, would the underlying error be looked into and dealt with.